I guess you’ve heard of Dormzilla, the mega-dorm with windowless rooms that 97-year-old billionaire Charles Munger designed for the University of California at Santa Barbara.
The controversy surrounding the 4,500-room dormitory is this unusual architectural story that transitions from the painterly boundaries of the design discourse into the wider public imagination. Unfortunately, these stories always seem to be negative – e.g. the collapse of the Surfside Tower in Miami or the endless death ray saga of the Museum Tower in Dallas – which suggests that architecture is taken for granted despite its ubiquitous influence on our daily lives.
So be it. At the very least, these dramas are an opportunity to ponder how we could build better, and we can certainly do a lot better than Munger’s Folly, an 11-story, 1.67 million square foot building priced at about $ 1.5 billion .
The Kerfuffle at Munger Hall went viral in late October after the Independent of Santa Barbara reported that Dennis McFadden, a member of the UCSB’s Design Review Committee, had resigned in protest of the project, calling it “not from my point of view as an architect portable “denotes a parent and a human.”
I’m not entirely sure what is more repulsive about the project, the design itself, or the obscene conditions in which it was commissioned. Munger, an amateur architecture engineer who got rich as an executive at Berkshire Hathaway and a partner with Warren Buffett, offered the school $ 200 million to build the project, but if – and only if – his design was accepted. It’s not the first time he has insisted on such an arrangement: Munger dormitories have been built at both the University of Michigan and Stanford.
The UCSB project has gained so much more prominence than these previous examples because it dwarfs them by several orders of magnitude. It’s a gigantic thing, a huge block with nine identical floors of dormitories, each arranged in groups of eight individual rooms that flank a common area. Meeting rooms, lounges, a gym, and other common areas have windows, but dorms do not. Instead, they come with adjustable LED panels that theoretically mimic the effects of natural light.
“When in your life were you able to change the sun? You can do it in this dorm, ”Munger told the New York Times, which taped the story after catching fire online.
Like many foolish endeavors, it is the product of good intentions that have gone miserably wrong. Munger’s suggestion is that the small, windowless rooms push students into common areas, promoting community and collaboration. The uniformity of the design – frighteningly cut out in its repetition in the floor plan – would enable cost-saving prefabrication.
Despite its progressive intentions and the university’s claim that the dormitory was created “with flourishes and elegance,” aesthetically it lacks any creative ambition and an unwieldy conservatism that disregards the principles of classical design.
For his part, McFadden called it “a social and psychological experiment with unknown effects on the lives and personal development of the students the university serves”.
In the age of COVID, a lack of natural ventilation seems especially foolish, aside from the other dangers posed by windowless design – fire safety, the cumulative smell of 4,500 college students – not to mention the dubious moral of having students as ignorant lab rats to treat. Munger’s claim that the rooms are “quite cheery” is disproved by the overall premise of the design, which is to encourage students to leave.
It doesn’t have to be like that. “Even the architecture of prisons allows windows, albeit small and mean,” says architect Frank Barkow, partner at Barkow Leibinger, who recently completed a model residential complex named after Sid Richardson at Rice University in Houston. McFadden’s resignation, according to Barkow, “rightly demonstrates the ethics and inhumanity of this latest form of amateurism.”
Inevitably there has been a backlash to the online backlash, fueled by proponents of urban density, for whom that quality is the overarching and all-encompassing goal. “It’s time to not just build this dorm, but build this dorm almost anywhere,” Choire Sicha wrote in a column for New York magazine.
I am an advocate of dense communities that are environmentally resistant, but humans are not ants, even if the richest of us tend to treat the public as such.
Which in the end is the ultimate problem with this design; the idea that, by the sheer power of their purse, the richest can impose their own prerogatives on the rest of us, however foolhardy those prerogatives may be.
This, in many ways, is the story of Dallas, a city where an elitist business class exerted overwhelming control over government policy and civil affairs.
The Vegas-style fountain to be placed at the base of Klyde Warren Park is a product of this type of patronage, which imposes an inappropriate design project on the public with virtually no responsibility.
“This is not something a weirdo does alone in a room,” Munger told the Times in defense. That is unfortunately true, and it is a fact that makes it all the more disappointing.
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